Comics Time: Mouse Guard: Fall 1152

David Petersen is a prodigiously talented illustrator, no question. When it comes to being a writer, he may not know art, but he knows what he likes. In its somber, Tolkienesque way, this tale of swordplay and strife amid warring factions of medieval mice warriors is just as much a product of the “art of enthusiasm” school of genre mash-up as Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim or Brubaker, Fraction, and Aja’s The Immortal Iron Fist, or even Neil Marshall’s Doomsday. Without a hint of irony it clearly exists to repackage Petersen’s favorite tropes–Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, Watership Down‘s red in tooth and claw fuzzy-rodent society, Tolkien’s faux-archaiac prose, Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped villains–into a whole that satisfies his own obsessions, all in the hopes that it will satisfy others’ as well.

Mission accomplished on that score, at least for this reviewer, at least for the most part. Listen, I’m sure there are more hardcore fantasy devotees out there who would tear it to shreds for its likeable but stock characters and storylines (three guesses as to whether the black mouse called Midnight is the Guard’s secret traitor) and the clunkiness of the prose (“There I found the record of legend being fact”). Comics readers might object to pacing that frequently gets ahead of itself (introductory text pieces that kick off each chapter deliver vital information skipped by the comic itself; the climax of the story arrives too suddenly). You can probably tell from those flaws whether or not this thing is your cup of meat; there are probably many of you for whom it isn’t. I for one wish the book displayed even a modicum of self-awareness, let alone humor, about itself; I can’t imagine Petersen thinks anything other than he’s making one for the ages, and that loss of perspective hurts him at critical moments, from shading his characters to recognizing the failure of the ending.

But never once did I feel like my intelligence was insulted, a prerequisite for any action-adventure comic that many fail to meet. Nor did I feel like I was “reading” a series of pin-ups or illustrations instead of a comic. For all his pure chops–the lush, textural colors, the evocatively shaky line, the note-perfect cute-savage mouse designs–Petersen does indeed cartoon in these pages. The sound effect for a snake’s hiss weaves sinuously through the foliage. A sudden cut to a goggles-wearing mouse elicits a guffaw. Astute use of photorealism gives predatory snakes and crabs an otherworldly air. Even the format–the pages are square!–speaks to Petersen’s confidence in his vision. It’s not quite fully realized, indeed for anyone other than Petersen it probably couldn’t be, but as comics’ answer to Harry Potter it entertained me enough to tune in next time.

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Aqua Leung Vol. 1 Mark Smith, writer Paul Maybury, artist Image, April 2008 208 pages $17.99 Buy it from Amazon.com Here’s a book you can’t help but compare to other, similar projects that are mining this same vein of…

Everything I Do

Hi! My name is Sean T. Collins and I am a writer. Here are links to basically every place on the internet where you can find what I do. A site for everything and everything on its site, that’s my motto. Non-tumblrs up top, tumblrs down below.

All Leather Must Be Boiled: News and views on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, located at boiledleather.com. Home of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, co-hosted by Stefan Sasse. Of all my tumblrs this is where you’ll find the widest range of posts, as I often rope in pretty much anything I’m thinking and writing about television, fiction, fantasy, genre storytelling, politics, whatever. Beneath the gold, the bitter steel.

The True Black: Comics written by me and drawn by a host of talented collaborators. Also contains news of upcoming comics projects.

Bowie Loves Beyoncé: You can’t say no to the beauty and the beast, darling. Images of two of the best human beings and popular musicians, David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. This was my first tumblr, so it’s what shows up when I like your posts.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts: No man with a good t-shirt needs to be justified. Good pictures of our greatest garment.

Superheroes Lose: Superhero publishers love putting pictures of their superheroes losing on the covers of their comics. I love putting them on this tumblr. When we imagine people who can do anything, this is what we imagine.

Badge: Stories of police brutality, overkill, and overreach in the United States of America, reblogged from around the internet with minimal comment. Before they bring the curtain down.

The Deep Ones: There’s something in the water. Sea monsters real, extinct, and imaginary. Co-founded and co-curated by me and Julia Gfrörer.

The Devil in Love: A man of wealth and taste. Images of the infernal with undeniable aesthetic and/or erotic appeal. Founded by Julia, co-curated by me.

Homage to Catalonia: Images of churches on fire or in ruins as a means by which to contemplate the positive and negative energy generated by the buildings and realized in the flames. Founded by me, co-curated by Julia.

Comics Democracy: Comics with over 10,000 notes on tumblr, found while tumbling and reblogged without comment. I will show you a world without gatekeepers.

Cool Practice: What I wanted to be and how I wanted to be it, one song at a time. Thoughts on music and its intersection with “coolness.”

Sean T. Collins on Comics: A repository for writing about comics (mostly comics on the web, mostly alternative-genre comics at that) for my former day job, this tumblr will also sometimes reblog writing-about-comics I’ve done elsewhere.

Sean T. Collins on Culture: The twin of seantcomics, this tumblr houses my old dayjob writing on genre culture that influenced me as a kid. Who knows what I’ll get up to with it eventually?

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour: A dedicated tumblr for my ASoIaF/GoT podcast, created for iTunes syndication purposes, but hey, you can follow it if you want.

In addition, I created several one-off tumblrs to host individual webcomics written by me and drawn by other people. I plan to reblog all of them to The True Black eventually, but here they are in their native habitats: